HE thoughts uppermost in these days in the mind of every Englishman must needs be thoughts of the worldwar and of all its tremendous issues for his own country and for mankind. But those of us whom age or sex keeps from the field, and whose energies are not wholly given to services on behalf of our fighting forces, must needs, if we are not to give way under the stress of the time, have other thoughts to "interpose a little ease" and occupy at least a part of our minds. Those which have lately most occupied my own have been connected with a particular spot of English ground, and one by aspect and association dedicated above others to the sentiment of field enjoyment and repose. Many of my American readers no doubt know the place well. It is that beautiful bit of home scenery, the vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking, where the creeping Mole winds and burrows its way between the

great chalk scarp of Box Hill, part bare down and part shagged with boxwood and whitebeam and juniper scrub, on one side, and the richly timbered park lands of Norbury on the other. More particularly it is the point, just beneath the steep of the scarp, where the highway spans the stream at Burford Bridge and an ancient and much frequented roadside inn, with its garden and outbuildings, is ensconced close by. The main area of Box Hill, slopes and summit, has for years, with the consent of the owners of the soil, served in summer as a holiday jaunting-ground for van-loads of London schoolchildren and picnickers and beanfeasters; while the inn at its foot, and a certain cottage near by, have for lovers of letters and of genius been consecrated by associations, some long bygone and some recent, too intimate and deep to be effaced or much disturbed by any amount of such occasional and passing bustle. Lately there arose a danger threatening both the popular holiday uses of the site and the deeper and dearer associations it held for the few.

land never touched by the spade or plough, heathery or grassy or pine-clad expanses of our Surrey or Kentish hills, some of all these we have secured already, and with them such a monument of primeval worship as the Druid Circle near Keswick, such a haunt of literary memories as the cottage in the Quantocks where Coleridge wrote 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan,' and a good sprinkling, up and down the country, of remains of ancient civic or manorial architecture that were or would soon have been in risk of demolition. These things are only a beginning. There is very much more yet to be acquired and made safe. But even through the stress of war we who have worked for and with the Trust may think with pleasure of what has so far been done in this kind: and one of the best and latest of our acquisitions, as I have indicated, has been that of the familiar wooded crest and open declivities of Box Hill.

But the reasons which have drawn my thoughts so much toward the site have been only in part connected with the fact of its acquisition by the Trust. They have been also, and in two different ways, dependent on special work on which I have been engaged. I have been doing my best, for one thing, to get right a certain chapter in a critical biography of the poet Keats which I have had long in preparation, the chapter in which he finishes 'Endymion' and writes certain lyrics the true dates of which have been lately for the first time ascertained. For another and separate thing, I have been trying to recall and fix, before it should be too late, my personal memories of a man of genius who is as likely to be interesting to a faroff future as to ourselves: I mean George Meredith. Now it happens that in the weeks when Keats was writing the last part of the last book of 'Endymion' and the lyrics in question, that is from soon after mid-November to early in December 1817, he was staying at that same wayside inn by Burford Bridge under Box Hill. And a cottage a quarter of a mile away, sheltered in a wooded nook at the foot of the main track that mounts the hill, was for the last forty years of his life the home of George Meredith.

Add to these a third and to me even

more attaching association. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed at the Burford Bridge Inn four times, first with his parents in 1878, when he wrote there the early part of the 'New Arabian Nights' (the Suicide Club chapters) and when, sensitively and shyly, not without fear of a rebuff, he sought leave to pay Meredith that homage of a beginner to a master which laid the foundation of their friendship. In the garden of a common friend they were invited to meet almost daily for several weeks, and Stevenson, who could be as engaging in deference as he was brilliant and stimulating in challenge, soon completely won the affection of his senior. It was on this occasion that I myself met Meredith for the first time: I remember how, having gone down to Box Hill for an afternoon, I was introduced to him across a stile or field-gate to which he had come up with the two Stevensons, Louis and Bob, at the end of a twelve mile walk: a thing of which Louis was well capable in those days, before his journey to California, but never afterwards. Stevenson was there again with his wife in 1881 and 1882, and for the last time in August 1886, a year before he left England never to return. When Meredith first planned his novel, 'The Amazing Marriage,' he meant to make one of its characters, Gower Woodseer, in some measure a portrait of R. L. S., but changed his purpose in the execution, and scarce a trace of likeness remains.

There was that about the place, apart from its illustrious neighborhood, which drew Stevenson for its own sake and set his imagination working. The Suicide Club stories, though written there, had of course nothing to do with the sentiment of the scene: they had been conceived in nocturnal prowls about London. But some years later Stevenson coupled the Burford Bridge Inn with the Hawes Inn at Queen's Ferry on the Forth. as a place made for adventure and thrilling with suggestions of potential romance. His words are well known:

"I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called

me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford."

The hope was realized as to Queen's Ferry, but never as to Burford Bridge. I imagine the attempt would have been made in connection with his projected tale, 'Jerry Abershaw,' at one time eagerly planned but never brought even so far into being as that other highway story, 'The Great North Road,' which remains so tantalizing a fragment in his work.

Near the end of last November, just before the twenty-first anniversary of Stevenson's death, I spent the sunset hour of a chill autumnal day wandering about that familiar and haunted scene. The weather had just cleared after storm: above the steep shoulder of the down a perfect half-moon hung in a sky of faint lilac shading into pure pearl-green: the darkened valley woods were of a deep misty brown touched here and there almost into crimson by the last lingering flames of autumn: the hills closing the valley southwestward stood purple and translucent like amethyst. The rich, solemnly glowing colors of the scene, with the tingling chill of the season, sent a thrill through one's blood and nerves intensifying the memories and associations of the place almost into actual presences, hauntings with which the very air seemed to vibrate.

I have said how Keats spent here the last ten days of November and the first week or more of December 1817. He was then just past his twenty-second birthday, and had been at work for seven months on 'Endymion.' Beginning the poem at Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight on April the 18th or 19th, he had writ

ten:

O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finished: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.

His prayer was all but granted: the autumn had not yet passed, though it was just passing, into winter when he wrote the last lines of the poem. The first book had been written between Carisbrooke, Margate, Canterbury, and Hampstead, and finished by mid-June; the second at Hampstead between mid-June and late August; the third during a six weeks' stay with a friend at Oxford ending on the Ist of October; the fourth and last again principally at Hampstead, until he came to Burford Bridge "to change the scenechange the air"- -so he wrote to a friend

"and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting five hundred lines."

Keats dearly loved a valley: he loved even the mere names denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of 'Paradise Lost' he gave a friend we find the following:

"Or have ye chosen this place After the toil of battle to repose Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?

There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction-a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry:

Others, more mild,

Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall
By doom of battle.

How much of the charm is in the 'valley'!"

There speaks, from his inmost self, a poet of another poet and as if to and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his everyday vein of speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply: "I like this place very much. There is Hill and

Dale and a little River.

I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon-'You a' seen the moon'-came down and wrote some lines."

All lovers of English poetry are by this time aware-though it took several generations of readers to find out-that in 'Endymion' Keats has turned the old Grecian moon-myth into a parable of the striving of the poetic soul in man to enter into full communion with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world. The moon with her magic, under her classic names Cynthia or Phoebe, is for Keats the symbol of that essential principle of beauty: the shepherd prince Endymion is the incarnation of the passion which makes all poets long to be taken into the very heart and inmost sanctuary of beauty. It is this symbolic intention which furnishes the only adequate clew to guide us through the mazes of the poem, its bewildering, teeming, unpruned intricacies of invention and detail.

Two main theories or convictions, both quite simple in themselves, dictate and control the general course of the adventures which the poet devises for his hero. One is that the soul enamoured of and striving for union with essential Beauty cannot achieve its quest by pursuing it in solitude and selfishness, but only after being first purified and taken out of itself by active sympathy with the lives and sufferings of others. This is a doctrine held as strongly by Keats as by Shelley, and inspired, or at least fortified, in them both by the teaching of Wordsworth. The whole of the third book of 'Endymion' is occupied in enforcing it by telling how the hero, surprised into self-forgetfulness by sympathy with the sage and sea-god Glaucus under the afflictions laid upon him by Circe, is enabled to break her spells and for his reward is endowed by the sage with all his own dear-bought treasures of mystic knowledge and experience; and how, thus endowed, he finds that he can work miracles of joy and deliverance for his fellow creatures. The other leading idea or tenet underlying the poetic luxuriance of 'Endymion' is that the instinctive love of the poet for

all and each of the manifold different and dispersed beauties of things and beings upon earth is in its nature identical with

the passion for that one transcendental and essential Beauty. Hence the various divine or human love-adventures which befall the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to lure him away from his supreme quest and make him unfaithful to it, are shown in the end to have been no infidelities but only so many attractions exercised by his one celestial mistress in various disguises. The last part of the fourth book, the part which Keats wrote at Burford Bridge, is given to the final clearingup and solution of this mystery. Endymion, having fallen in love with an Indian damsel whom he finds strayed from the train of Bacchus and forsaken in the forest, is distracted at thinking himself false to Cynthia the moon-goddess, the divine object of his quest. He and his new earthly love are carried by hippogriffs on an aerial flight among the constellations, to the near neighborhood of the enthroned Cynthia herself, the conflict of the two passions disturbing and bewildering him all the while: then he is swept down to earth again, and passionately determines to abandon his superhuman quest and devote himself humbly to the joys of a country life in the company of his earthly love:

There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent
But starv'd and died. My sweetest Indian, here,
His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
Here will I kneel, for thou redeemèd hast
My life from too thin breathing.

But she, being in truth no other than Cynthia in a mortal disguise, cannot accept this future either for her lover or for herself, and a long passage ensues in which they both plan schemes of renunciation, she to become a votaress in the temple of Diana, he to lead a hermit life in the forest, visited only by his sister: until at the last moment the supposed Indian maiden suddenly dispels all clouds by throwing off her lendings and revealing herself for what she is:

And as she spake, into her face there came
Light, as reflected from a silver flame:
Her long black hair swell'd ampler, in display
Full golden; in her eyes a brighter day
Dawn'd blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld

Phoebe, his passion!

And so the quest is ended, and the mystery solved: Endymion's earthly passion,